You really need to approach each book as if you have been a failure. . . . If you start to believe your flap-copy, you're finished as a writer.

...which causes me to wonder, my own purpose on so many days as humble as the spider's, what is beautiful that I make? What is elegant? What feeds the world?

There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.

You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.

People forget the good, because the bad has more punch.

Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.

When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.